Peer Khairi showed no emotion in court as he looked at horrific photographs of the deadly, gaping wound he had inflicted upon his long-time wife.

Pathologist Dr. Allan Hunt said Randjida Khairi drowned in her own blood “immediately” — meaning within 15 minutes — after a sharp knife opened the 10-cm-long throat slash, cutting two major blood vessels on March 18, 2008.

As Hunt testified Tuesday and described the size and depth of each wound, the post-mortem photographs were shown to shocked jury members.

Meanwhile, Khairi glanced nonchalantly at the photos, nodding to his Dari interpreter when he was finished looking at them.

“You wouldn’t die within seconds. These cuts cause significant blood loss and the blood wouldn’t be getting to the brain,” testified Hunt at the second-degree murder trial of Khairi.

The 65-year-old has admitted inflicting the deadly wounds but is pleading not guilty to murder.

The prosecution alleges Khairi killed his wife of more than 30 years partly because she permitted their six children to live Western style, letting their eldest daughter sleep over at her fiance’s parents home on weekends.

The 5-foot-1, 86-pound, 53-year-old woman lost a massive quantity of her estimated five litres of blood, which soaked the mattress where she was lying.

The victim died from blood loss and aspiration of blood resulting from the severing of her left carotid artery and left jugular vein. Her voice box was sliced as the knife nicked the skin of her vertebra, almost decapitating her, court heard.

Hunt opined that the throat-slicing happened first, due to the scarcity of blood found in the lower torso wound area where the artery was cut. Instead of the usual 300 ml (20 tablespoons) of blood he expected to find, Hunt found only 50 ml of blood, or 3.38 tablespoons of blood.

The victim also had only three defensive wounds, cuts on her left wrist, left forearm and one skinned knuckle, court heard.